Your feet will take you to where your heart is.
-- Irish Proverb

As he looked about his sister's house, it occurred to Michael Kilbride that he had traded up one prison for another. With its painted silks, shiny trinkets, and mysterious mixed fragrance of incense and spice, this place was intensely female. It held no point of reference for a man who'd just spent fourteen years in the enforced company of other men.

"You'll be having the upstairs room," his sister Vi said as she flung off a bright blue woolen cloak she'd worn to protect herself from the nip of an Irish winter. "There's a full bath, too. You should be comfortable enough, but I'd have an eye to the ceiling height. This house wasn't built for a man of your size."

"It wasn't built for a man at all," he muttered and shifted uneasily from foot to foot. He knew he sounded ungrateful, and half felt that way, too.

"True enough," she answered with a shrug. "This is mine, and mine alone. But you're welcome here till you can get back on your feet." She paused and frowned, a crease showing between green eyes that were mirrors of his own. "And I'm sorry for the way Mam and Da are acting."

He reached down and fingered a jewel-bright throw that curled along the back of a couch. "Don't apologize for them. It doesn't matter."

She gave him an impatient look, his Vi, who'd never been a Violet, even when a child. "It does, and I will make apologies for them. But no excuses. They're too wrapped up in their comforts to think what you might be feeling."

Truth be told, he wasn't feeling anything much but hungover. He longed for a bed with sheets any color but grayish-white. He longed for the ability to sleep past five-thirty in the morning. And he found the intimacy of this talk more than he could stomach.

Michael snatched up the duffel bag that contained his belongings. "Upstairs, you say." As he made his way up the narrow wooden steps, he heard Vi call from below.

"I'm only having mercy because of your miserable head. And mine, too. But you won't be getting out of other conversations this easily!"

Michael allowed himself a victorious smirk as he rounded the sharp bend in the stairs to his hideaway. Then he smacked his head straight into the low-hung plaster ceiling. At his snarled obscenity, Vi's laughter drifted up.

"It's no less than you deserve," she admonished.

To Michael's way of thinking, it was just another inexact measure of blind justice.

Having negotiated the last treacherous curve of stair, he ducked till he reached the center of the room with its sloped ceiling, then surveyed his surroundings. He didn't need much, and virtually anything would have seemed luxurious to him. But as always, Vi had seen to his comfort. The bedroom was bold and cheerful, and a bathroom little bigger than a closet took up the far end of the space.

A bed large enough for two, he noted, though that would never be an issue -- even if he weren't in his sister's home. In his scant four days of freedom, he'd already discovered that he attracted exactly the hard and bitter type of woman he didn't want. No great surprise there.

Michael dropped his nylon duffel in the center of the bed. The quilt, a noisy affair with concentric spirals of bronze and gold, hardly moved under the bag's negligible weight. All his worldly goods... One change of clothes, ten punts fifty, plus the U2 tee shirt he'd won in a dice game last night. If he'd drunk less and played more, today's state of affairs might seem less bleak. Then again, perhaps not.

He sat on the edge of the bed -- so soft that he wagered he'd end up sleeping on the floor -- and slipped off his shoes and socks. Standing again, he tugged off his gray sweatshirt and unzipped jeans so starchy and new that it pained him to look at them. Underwear followed. He padded to the shower, turned it on, and stood under its needle-sharp spray until hot had run to cold. A small luxury, but an appreciated one, to be sure.

When Michael returned downstairs, showered and clean-shaven but not precisely repentant for the prior evening's excesses, his sister gave him an appraising look, then shoved a mug into his hands. "I've made a tea of anise and caraway, one of Nan's old recipes. What the shower and time haven't purged from last night's binge, this should."

Purged. Michael eyed the mug suspiciously. "Think not."

"You've drunk worse," Vi pointed out. "Last night, for instance."

That comment was enough to eke out his first smile of the day. "You're hardly free of sin yourself, little sister."

Scowling, Vi busied herself wrapping her wild red hair into a loose knot atop her head. "Just trying to keep you company, that was all. Now drink. I need your head clear. We've serious matters to discuss."

Michael set the mug on the low table in front of the fireplace. "Then you'll be wanting me alive, too."

It wasn't so much that he didn't believe in their grandmother's skills, or Vi's for that matter. His pretended disbelief was as much a part of the ritual as drinking the tea itself. He sprawled onto the couch and awaited his sister's countermove. When none came he knew that it was serious business indeed.

Copyright © 2003 by Dorien Kelly